6:59 a.m. 25 degrees, wind N 6 mph, whistling down the stovepipe. A landscape sprinkled with snow. Sky: an overcast winter gray, flurries. Permanent streams: rocks in riffles iced-over, others dusted. Intermittent streams: sections retreat beneath mats of frozen leaves, a hollow-sounding flow. Wetlands: a dim testimony to the coming of winter, still as steel. On the far side of the marsh, crossbills gather in the pillared pines. Pond: immaculately white, ice-over and dusted. Where the stream empties into the pond, a shorter, narrower lead of open water.
Chickadees arrived at the feeder fifteen minutes before sunrise. Followed immediately by a dove. Along the road, pockets of jays and nuthatches, both species, punctuate the silence. When I return home, more than thirty turkeys explode from the yard—head southwest, a discharge of big birds, labored flaps, then glides on bowed wings. Reassemble in the pines—blobs on branches.
When I was a graduate student, forty-five years ago, I took a forest ecology class taught by a professor with a spiritual bent, who remarked (more than once) that a forest was merely one organism with many trunks; a point often repeated in the recent documentary Fantastic Fungi and in Richard Powers' Overstory, winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This morning, as I waited for dawn, I read "The Social Life of Forests," in the December 6 issue of The New York Times Magazine. The essay highlighted the research of Suzanne Simard, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who demonstrated that within six Douglas fir stands, each about ten thousand square feet, all trees were connected underground by a network of fungi, none with more than three degrees of separation. One large Douglas fir linked to forty-seven others, perhaps as many as two hundred fifty. Trees shared carbon and nitrogen and water. Nutrients passed in either direction depending on the season. Dying trees, purposely stripped of needles, transferred carbon to neighboring trees, not necessarily their own species. Knowledge of the sharing of underground resources between trees through a fungal pipeline, referred to as The Wood-Wide Web, by the scientific journal Nature (1997), a prestigious British weekly, would have awoken Darwin to a forestry notion of socialism, a symbiosis between underground partners . . . which, apparently, includes everything with roots and mycelia.
Forest Socialism: one tree rejuvenates another; dying trees disperse stored resources; hardwoods benefit conifers; conifers benefit hardwoods. Trees benefit fungi. Fungi benefit trees. A shared store of information flowing in all directions. A community of the miraculous.
Thank you. Discovering your posts via Daybreak has been a gift. Learning from your pith.
We should listen and learn! Read that article yesterday. Have always been excited to see and a fan of mycorrhizae!